Greg Smith said:
No games company would dream of doing a write-up for a new creature without an illustration. The same should be true for ships.
Well I dont know about the other playtesters, but we actually made a point of requesting pictures for ships and vehicles for Minbari.. in fact we do for most books.
For us a stat block is all well and good, but in order to help visualise the situation an image you can quickly show them resolves all confusion and instantly paints the picture.
I'm not sure why pictures weren't included for all vehicles and ships, space issues, or further delays, additional costs etc.. its hard to say, though i'm sure it was unavoidable or inpractical. But the old addage "A picture paints a thousand words" is born of wisdom i'd say and should be heeded in where possible.
I did notice recently however, after following some posted links to AOG's miniatures in order to see what some vehicles and vessels looked like.. (And although i'm lo' to gripe) It dawned on me that many of the spacecraft in particular "are" illustrated in the action CGI scenes throughout the book.. but unless you owned the AOG miniatures or had played Bab 5 wars, which neither myself nor my group did. There was absolutely no way to identify the vessels portrayed as the pictures had no text to describe what was being depicted.